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>> Hi, I'm Mathew Moskovciak associate editor at CNET.com and this is the Phillips HDS 8100 sound bar. As you can see, they've managed to whittle down this home theatre in a box system to just two components that you'll need in your living room, which is this large sound bar unit and this subwoofer. Now the first thing you're going to notice on a system like this is it has a very sleek minimalistic design, which should be pretty unobtrusive in a living room. Now with a speaker this slim you're probably wondering how did they manage to pack a DVD player into it. Well, if you just hit the open and close button on the top you'll see that the front actually slides back and it's pretty cool looking to reveal the DVD player inside. Now in terms of functionality the DVD player you can connect it to your TV using the HDMI output. But we were actually a little bit impressed by the Phillips. It did pretty solid job not as good as more expensive players, but overall it wasn't bad. Another included feature in the Sound Bar is an iPod dock. Now the iPod dock's a nice add on the only thing is that it does take away a little bit from the minimalist styling, because you have to connect the dock with this wire to the back of the unit. So it won't be quite as nice as just having a single connection from the main unit to the subwoofer. Now like other single speaker solutions the Sound Bar tries to recreate a surround sound experience from just on large speaker. Now at doing that it did a pretty good job. It's certainly not going to sound like a real surround sound system, but for people that are willing to make some sacrifices for the convenience it does a pretty good approximation. Now if you're a music fan you're probably gonna be a little bit more disappointed. Overall we were really impressed with the minimum design of the Sound Bar and we think people that put a premium on design are really gonna like this. I'm Matt Moskovciak associate editor at CNET.com and this is the Phillips HDS 8100 Sound Bar.
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